The prior art includes devices, systems, and equipment designed to process and display medical data for a patient. For example, patient monitoring equipment is often used to graphically display a patient's heart rate, blood pressure, and other measured physiological characteristics. The prior art also includes medical devices that are intended for personal use by the patient or the patient's caregiver; such medical devices may be designed to be carried by the patient or designed for use in the home. For example, diabetics are usually required to modify and monitor their daily lifestyle to keep their body in balance, in particular, their blood glucose (BG) levels. Individuals with Type 1 diabetes and some individuals with Type 2 diabetes use insulin to control their BG levels. To do so, diabetics routinely keep strict schedules, including ingesting timely nutritious meals, partaking in exercise, monitoring BG levels daily, and adjusting and administering insulin dosages accordingly.
The prior art includes a number of insulin pump systems that are designed to deliver accurate and measured doses of insulin via infusion sets (an infusion set delivers the insulin through a small diameter tube that terminates at a cannula inserted under the patient's skin). In lieu of a syringe, the patient can simply activate the insulin pump to administer an insulin bolus as needed, for example, in response to the patient's current BG level. A patient can measure his BG level using a BG measurement device, such as a test strip meter, a continuous glucose measurement system, or the like. BG measurement devices use various methods to measure the BG level of a patient, such as a sample of the patient's blood, a sensor in contact with a bodily fluid, an optical sensor, an enzymatic sensor, or a fluorescent sensor. When the BG measurement device has generated a BG measurement, the measurement can be displayed on the BG measurement device and/or the BG measurement device can transfer the measurement data to another device, such as a continuous glucose monitoring system that monitors the patient's BG level in substantially real time.
Insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitoring devices may also be configured to communicate with remote control devices, monitoring or display devices, BG meters, and other devices associated with such an infusion system. Any of the individual devices within an infusion system may include a display element, and it is desirable to utilize these display elements to display the patient's BG level. Historically, BG levels have been displayed numerically or as a graph over time. Although such graphical displays might adequately convey the BG level information, they can be limited in the amount of additional information they provide. Moreover, such graphical displays may not be intuitive and easy to read.